WHERE WERE YOU ON 9/11?

Sep 09, 2011

"Turn on the TV": the Blurt staff and contributors offer up their personal remembrances.

BY FRED MILLS

Though it may well be one of the week's most shopworn clichés, "Where were you on 9/11?" has an inevitable, indelible resonance for today's generation, just as surely as "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" was an earlier generational signpost. Hence our assembly of members of the editorial staff and contributing writers, to mark the tenth anniversary of that life- and nation-changing event. As humans, we all feel the need from time to time to enter our voices into the public record, and for an event of such tragic magnitude as 9/11 there's also a collective urgency to ensure that, unlike perhaps the ephemeral tragedies of everyday life, no one no one ever forgets.

Some of the entries come from folks who, like me, found themselves far away from Ground Zero yet were still affected, in ways large and small, by the relentless radio and television coverage and 9/11's awful lingering aftermath. Others are offered by those who at the time lived and worked in New York or had associates and close friends there. In compiling these stories, I found myself revisiting my own, and in turn experiencing all the emotions that so many of us wish we could push aside permanently but probably need to revisit from time to time because they are memories that need to be carried forward.

I'm struck by a remark one of the contributors made when I first broached the subject of a Blurt 9/11 meditation. "It's a wonderful idea, but I'm not so sure I should participate," the writer told me. "My story just seems so trivial, it's bound to be out of place among all the others."

Hardly. The term "trivial" suggests something without worth or relevance, something that should be ignored or discarded. There are no stories here that fit that definition, at least not by my reckoning. True, none of the Blurt-ers charged up a smoke-filled stairwell or dug an injured person out of a pile of rubble - although one of our NYC-based correspondents did help some of his stranded co-workers get out of Lower Manhattan rather than think solely about his own ass, and another one provided lodging for a relative who, due to the traffic disruptions, was unable to return home to his wife and children in New Jersey. There are no trivialities uttered in these essays, merely honest reflections and accounts of how average people reacted on that anything-but-average Tuesday morning and how they went about processing what happened. It's a fool's game, anyway, to try to predict what one will do under the influence of extreme shock, disbelief, and grief (my own entry is a classic example of someone behaving, initially at least, in a manner wholly opposite to how I might have predicted or wished myself reacting).

It's probably another cliché to note that in sharing such remembrances, we're also acknowledging the ties that bind us as Americans and as humans. If there's something wrong with that, however, I don't want to hear about it. To the writer who fretted about coming across as "trivial" - and to everyone else who contributed - thanks for ultimately putting aside such concerns and for laying your reflections out for all of us to read. Oh, and a special thanks to singer-songwriter Ruth Gerson as well, who wrote about her experience being in New York City on 9/11 (36 months pregnant at the time) for us as part of our ongoing series of artist-penned essays, "The Most Fucked Up Thing I've Ever Seen." You can read it here on the BLURT website.

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Nancy Dunham, Alexandria VA (9/11: on Alaskan cruise)

I woke up slowly the morning of our 10th wedding anniversary. Why not? The Alaskan cruise we were on was nothing if not relaxing. Slowly I remembered the plans we had on this day, though, and I felt a burst of energy. We then heard some mumbled announcement from the ship's PA system, but the ship's hallway speakers weren't the best and we couldn't make out what they were saying. Something about weather, we thought, as I climbed out of bed and headed for the shower while my husband turned on the TV.

I had never really thought that much about my American citizenship or what it meant to me. Sure, I had decided not to pursue a journalism post in Canada, but that was more instinct than patriotism. The best way I can describe my change in attitude during and following the acts of terrorism against the U.S. is by likening it to the overpowering love you feel when you fear for a loved one's safety. I feared for our friends who were working in the Pentagon during the attack. I feared for my friends and sister who lived and worked in New York. Most of all, I feared for our country.

Yet there was no need. True, the United States isn't perfect because we aren't perfect. That has always been the case. But it's also still the case that we are strong. We are brave. No matter what trouble and turmoil we face - internal or external - we are indivisible. We are, after all, the U.S.A.

Jose Martinez, Los Angeles CA

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was recovering from a late night out at the Hollywood Ceremony in celebration for the new Slayer release. Piles of the band's new CD lay in a coffin in a hearse, while we enjoyed an open bar inside a small chapel. I remember thinking in the back of my mind, this is so wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if this blasphemous moment would cause the end of the world.

Sleeping in, I woke up when I got a call from my father. He said, "The world is on fire and you're still in bed." I had no idea what he meant. He said planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, and that the Twin Towers, which I had visited that summer, were on fire, and that another plane had crashed in the Pentagon and yet another in a field in Pittsburgh. I said ‘Pittsburgh!' and rolled over in bed, but I couldn't shake the feeling that he wouldn't be making up such stories so I reached for the remote control and turned on the TV.

I would be fixed to the television for days. But as a magazine editor, I remember thinking: we have shots scheduled in New York City. I quickly called a music publicist for an artist we needed to shoot in Los Angeles but had been told there was not time; well, she wasn't going anywhere any time soon, so I said, make it happen. It was strange, I felt guilty working. Yet my thoughts were 100% in the moment of what had just occurred. I love NY and have an affinity for the city and its vibrant energy and I have a lot of friends and contacts there. The notion that someone could be killed just for showing up and doing their work was very off putting, yet it was reassuring watching everyone rally together and unite and do what needed to be done to help one another. I know I'll never forget what happened. That feeling has never fully gone away and I guess it never will.

John Schacht, Charlotte NC

I'd just stepped from the shower when the first airplane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center and sucked all the oxygen out of world. A friend called and left a concise message on my answering machine: "Dude, turn your TV on." From then on I watched in mounting horror and disbelief as another plane hit the South tower - I'd been in New York a few months earlier and stopped in at the WTC#5 Borders during my downtown peregrinations - and then another smashed into the Pentagon.

Before the towers collapsed, I was already numb with shock; the horror and grief sketched on each upturned face put every empathetic human in the streets of New York, too. But the memories that stick with me most were the people who leapt or fell to their deaths from the upper floors. A few years prior I'd seen similar images from the infamous Joelma high-rise fire in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and they, too, were branded onto my memory forever - what went through a person's mind at that fateful moment? Was it sadness? Anger at the injustice? Or an unknowable relief that fight or flight was over?

Eventually, September 11's nightmare images added a realpolitik dimension - we were at war, and I knew with certainty that the justifiable anger we felt that day would be twisted into a jingoistic response by Bush and his Puppet Masters, with the knowing consent and/or idiocy of the cable news sound-bite ninnies. (For the record, I was - and still am - all about wiping out Al Qaeda and the backward scourge of Talibanism.) You didn't know it then, but the solidarity the rest of the civilized world felt with us was already under assault by the Machiavellian machinations of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the Baghdad Bungler Bremmer.

In the following years, I waited for a musician to capture the horror of those events and channel it into something transcendent. Something we might all rally around again. Springsteen gave it a shot with The Rising, but fell well short; Black Heart Procession captured the mounting angst and paranoia of the Bush years with The Spell, but not the humanity that made it so horrific; Calexico's misguided left-turn Garden Ruin merely proved how out-of-sorts most of us were during the Bush era. Eventually I realized that a defining LP or song wasn't just impossible, it wasn't even necessary - all good music is a rebuke to the medieval criminals responsible for 9/11, and that is enough.

Fred Mills, BLURT Editor, Asheville NC (9/11: in Wadesboro NC)

On the morning of September 11 my bags were packed and beside the front door; living at the time in my tiny hometown located on the NC/SC border, I'd spent the previous evening getting ready for a trip to New York City for the annual CMJ music conference, my first visit to the city in ages. (I spent my honeymoon in NYC.) Literally just minutes before I was to drive to the airport, my wife's sister called and said, simply, "Turn on the TV."

They say we process shock in so many different ways it's impossible to catalogue them all, and in my case a big component was anger - at being "inconvenienced" and having my travel plans so summarily "disrupted." I distinctly remember getting on the phone to dial the CMJ offices, and when I got through after a few tries the person on the other end of the line sounded more than a little unsettled herself, telling me that she was certain some of the scheduled shows would be cancelled but that she wasn't sure yet if the entire conference was off. After a few more hours it was clear that pretty much everything scheduled in NYC that week would probably be cancelled...

For a long time I've felt ashamed at that initial reaction, but I realize now that I was no more behaving rationally that 99% of the rest of America. As the day progressed my feelings gave way to weird surges of adrenalin twinned with massive waves of grief and tears; utter exhaustion would follow. At one point I glanced over at my wife, who was sitting on the floor reading softly to my 8-month-old son, innocent and oblivious to the unfolding chaos, and suddenly I felt a sense of relief, too, knowing how lucky I was to be safe at home with my family. How would I have felt if I'd been in the air, or stuck at an airport, I wondered to myself? I've never been able to answer that question. Each subsequent 9/11 anniversary has been accompanied by a return of those emotions for me, and I think as a byproduct I've gained a heightened degree of empathy and compassion for people I don't know but with whom I'm somehow linked due to the events of that day.

A month later, with CMJ having been rescheduled for mid-October, I finally boarded my plane to New York. One of my assignments was to interview Joe Strummer, whose band The Mescaleros was booked at Irving Plaza, and Strummer, a veteran of many, many NYC sojourns, had nothing but admiration for the people of Manhattan and how they had all pulled together. At one point, talking about the terrorists, he just looked down and shook his head in disbelief. "People are nuts," he said. The next afternoon my friend Herb met me for coffee then took me over to view Ground Zero. A huge section was blocked off so we could only get within a few blocks, but I'll never forget (a) the sight and smell of smoke still rising from the area, along with glimpses of massive piles of rubble; (b) people - many of them children - walking around the area or waiting for buses while wearing white medical masks over their mouths and noses; and (c) handmade signs and posters hanging from the second- and third-story windows of some of the nearby buildings that read, What are you looking at? As I gawked, I had the uncomfortable feeling of intruding upon someone's personal tragedy, and while the tragedy was, in the larger sense, every American's, there's no way I could liken my feelings about 9/11 to those of someone who lived down here.

For the second time in so many months, I felt ashamed of myself, and I told Herb we should probably go.

A.D. Amorosi, BLURT Contributing Editor, Philadelphia PA

My 9/11 memory is simple. My wife and I had been married a little over a year and had moved into our new house in the Italian Market area of South Philly at the same time. We had a skylight window above us in our bedroom, a wide deck in front of that room and a garden below us (we still do). It was a sunny morning and my wife was just saying how great a day it was going to be and how beautiful the garden looked and how blue the sky was.

I wouldn't call myself an idyllic sort (nor a lounge-about past 6 a.m.) but this just happened to be one of those perfect morning-to-be-in-bed moments. "We should always remember this day, our lives could change on a dime," my wife said.

Both of us are CNN watchers but for some reason, FOX News was on, maybe something had blinked on our cable for a moment, so we were having coffee and lying with our dogs. Then FOX's morning news turned grave - quizzical - a team turning from the light fare of weight loss and anti-Democrat rhetoric to something harder and sadder.

The morning quickly shifted to one of alarm. My wife was no longer beaming and cheerful but frightened and tortured for the loss of life you could see and hear before us.

Jason Gross, Manhattan

That morning I was at work early in the East Village and heard the first plane fly overhead, having no idea what was going on. I heard a commotion outside and went to see a huge gapping hole in Tower One with smoke coming out, thinking it was an accident. Suddenly, I saw the second plane hit and explode into Tower Two. A chill ran through me then. I don't remember when I felt more helpless.

Later, from our work rooftop, we saw the skyline with only one tower, still smoking. As it crumbled and disappeared, we heard cries and screams from people on the street and on other rooftops. I think back to what someone on a music mailing list mournfully pleaded later: "I want my skyline back!"

I took home seven co-workers who couldn't travel back because the trains and buses were out of service. We saw several people walking back from the Tower site, covered in soot. We woke up my roommate and broke the news to him and spend the rest of the day watching CNN, but even all the details coming in couldn't explain what happened to all of us. I escorted some of them back to the train station to make sure they got out safely. As one coworker said, "It's going to be years before we really understand this." Later, my roommate would note that for the first time since he'd known me, I'd spend days without listening to any music.

About a month later, I was at CMJ Festival where they had an impromptu panel on the attack. At one point, the moderator broke down and cried. We all knew how he felt. One of the panelists said that he'd also been watching CNN for days, when he noticed that on the crawling headline marquee at the bottom of the screen, there was a story about Anna Nicole Smith. He found comfort in that: "Finally, there's a place in our lives for idle bullshit again!"

Somehow, I found comfort in that too.

Kenny Herzog, Beacon NY (9/11: in Brooklyn)

I'm not paying a ton of attention to the media coverage around this anniversary. I wasn't sure I wanted to write about this anniversary. It's only reminded me of how I still haven't thoroughly processed that morning and the ensuing days and weeks. Which, in turn, leads to thoughts of everyone we lost and the lifetime of struggles ahead for those who loved them. It really is too much to bear.

I was born in Queens, and raised there until I was 9, before moving to Long Island. By the age of 14, I was spending most of my spare time in Manhattan, buying records and seeing bands. After college, I spent nearly a decade living throughout North Brooklyn. Only this year did I move a significant distance from New York City, about 100 miles upstate. But this anniversary makes me think about my grandmother Blanche, who was born in Brooklyn more than 60 years before the World Trade Center towers opened. And my grandparents Magda and Joe, who emigrated to Washington Heights after surviving the Holocaust, roughly a quarter-century before WTC had broken ground. And the drives my family would take over the Whitestone and Throgs Neck Bridges, criss-crossing the city and spying the epic downtown skyline.

All of this makes it impossible not to span the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or Manhattan Bridge today without squinting and hoping the buildings will re-appear. That it will be 2000 or 1985 or the turn of the 20^th century. Because knowing how many New Yorkers had endured through so much life and loss for well over a century, never realizing this kind of destruction was ahead, is devastating. And we still don't know what lies ahead from now, nor do our children and grandchildren.

Those were strange days, just after 9/11. I listened to System of a Down's Toxicity a lot. It tapped into something. A rage, a helpless fear and sadness. Something. And I was lucky enough to have more music. To see Built to Spill encore with John Lennon's "Imagine" at Irving Plaza less than a month after the attacks. And in that same week in late September, rally with hundreds of others around Wilco's "California Stars" at Town Hall, which itself happened mere days after Sigur Rós delivered selfless catharsis to myself and a forever grateful Beacon Theater audience.

Sigur Rós and System of a Down. What a weird world. And nothing's been normal since. I'd give anything to make all of it unreal.

Dave Steinfeld, Manhattan
I remember September 11th, 2001 vividly. I was working in an office full-time, writing for a radio network based in midtown Manhattan. I was also living in Greenwich Village, in an apartment that I loved, where I could see the tops of the towers of the World Trade Center from my window.

That morning started out like any other, except for the fact that the weather was particularly nice - one of those crisp, clear early fall mornings. I was in the shower when the first plane hit, shortly before 9:00 am. A few minutes later, I went next door to grab a cup of coffee before work. While I was on line, a guy who worked in my building tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Wanna see something incredible?" I honestly remember thinking that he was going to point out some woman walking down the street. Instead, he told me to walk to the corner of the block and look at the towers. I did, and was shocked to see what looked like an airplane sticking out of the North tower, replete with fire and smoke. Terrorism didn't enter my mind at that point; I thought it was just a freak accident. It wasn't until the second plane hit that I knew something was horribly wrong.

For the next few hours, things happened quickly and no one knew what was going to happen next. It was both scary, sad and surreal. I withdrew some money from an ATM and walked to my cousin's office. I wanted to be with someone I knew. My cousin Jeff was unable to get back to New Jersey that night to be with his wife and young kids, so he spent the night at my apartment - which, ironically, had been his apartment years earlier,

I remember that in the weeks following September 11th, New York was affected in ways both good and bad. There was a sense of solidarity in the city (and beyond it) that was unusual. My Dad, who happens to be a therapist, came in from Connecticut that weekend to provide free counseling to people. But on the flipside, whenever anything remotely suspicious happened after 9/11 - like a fluke plane crash in Queens that November - many of us assumed it was terrorism.

The stupidest comment I can remember was from my boss at the time. When I went to work on the morning of Friday the 14th, I remember him saying, "Well! It looks like things are back to normal now." 10 years later, things still aren't really back to normal. The landscape has changed forever - literally and figuratively.

I'm in my 40s now. I'm a child of the 1970s - particularly, of the late ‘70s - and I glorify that period, which I guess many of us do about the time we grew up in. But being as objective as I can, I really think that in most respects the world was a better place back then. I never would have believed that the events of 9/11 - or of its aftermath - could possibly have happened until they did.

Incidentally, I've spoken with a few musicians about 9/11 over the years but Suzanne Vega is probably the one who stands out the most. She's a real New Yorker. When she released her last studio album, Beauty and Crime -- an album that deals partly with 9/11, its aftermath and its effects on her late brother, Tim Vega -- I asked her if she ever considered leaving Manhattan after the attacks. She said no, and I remember her specifically saying, "It never presented itself as an option" -- even though she could very easily have moved. To me, that said a lot about her connection to this city.

Rick Allen, Doylestown PA

I was the all-night disc jockey at a Philadelphia radio station located on Independence Mall. Most days my wife was on her way to work by the time I got home, which was usually around 7. That morning I put a tape in the VCR and fell asleep in my armchair. The film was over when I woke up so I flipped over to ‘TV' while I rewound it. The "Today Show" was in the midst of showing tape of the first bombing. While they were reviewing that crash the report of the second plane hitting came in. That's when talk started of something other than just a plane crash going on. And that's when I got scared.

I called my wife and the buzz was going around her office. I wanted her to come home right away but at that point neither one of us knew how serious things were. Before another hour had passed she called to say that the office was closing and she was coming home. By this time terms like "terrorist" were being bounced around and there was no sense as to how many more attacks were coming and what businesses types were being targeted. Things began to seem even more insane when we heard about the Pentagon and the crash in Pennsylvania. With the attacks coming inland and closer to the Philadelphia area I knew I couldn't even come close to relaxing until my wife got home. The wait was interminable.

I don't even remember the exact time she got home. Between the two of us, we had immediate family in Michigan, Oklahoma, Arizona, D.C., Virginia and different parts of Pennsylvania. By the time we contacted some of them I was more than scared; I was angry; angry at the people directly behind the attack and the people who had engineered the conditions that led to it. I was angry because the people who were killed were killed without any sensible purpose that I could see. I was angry at the possibility of personal loss and I was filled with a great anger as an American and the thought of my countrymen and women losing their lives just because they were Americans. I had to go to work that night and our studios were on a street perpendicular to Independence Hall, within fifty yards of the Liberty Bell. I worried that the area would be a prime symbolic target and also a practical one as it was part of the communication system. That worry lasted a while.

And I'm still angry too.

Lee Zimmerman, BLURT Contributing Editor, Miami FL

Like most people on the East Coast, I got news of the planes hitting the Twin Towers as it happened, while driving to my job. I was listening to Howard Stern - when he was on terrestrial radio - as I did every morning on my way to work. It took something truly cataclysmic to jolt Stern and his crew out of their usual self-indulgent childish chatter, so when they began talking about the fact that an airplane had hit a skyscraper, it was apparent that something horrible had indeed transpired.

Then, as now, I worked at a television station, WFOR-TV/CBS4, a network-owned outlet that covers South Florida. It was difficult not to be glued to our television monitors and TV sets throughout the entire day - and in fact, the days and weeks to come. We're news hounds after all, but more than that, we're also people, and the visceral images of our fellow citizens leaping to their deaths, the first responders racing towards the scene of the carnage, bystanders covered in dust wandering dazed in the streets, and the towers crashing to the ground were both horrifying and transfixing.

I remember tearing up on the first anniversary of 9/11, watching the memorial services for those brave souls in Pennsylvania, and to this day, it's still heartbreaking to watch the replays of the planes hitting the buildings and thinking about what those terrified passengers must have been thinking at the end. Seeing the ghoulish images of the monsters that perpetrated this massacre still brings a rush of anger and repulsion, and I must admit that my bloodlust hasn't diminished. I take no pity on those who have been subject to extreme interrogation or confined to Guantanamo. I don't advocate for their rights or promote any need for civil trials. Those involved aren't criminals, nor are they prisoners of war. They're monsters and ought to be treated as such. I vehemently disagree with those who suggest they deserve better or ought to be dealt with in accordance with our standard rules of prosecution. If we're to set any example for the world, let's set one that only these barbarians understand. You fuck with us, and we will fuck you up. No mercy. You'll be treated like the barbarians you are.

The lines between truth, logic and political correctness were blurred forever on 9/11. Now it's time to do what we have to do. Killing Bin Laden was just a start. All of his henchmen need to meet the same fate. Only next time, no burial rituals and religious respect please. The people on those planes didn't get the benefit of any such sacraments. Therefore, the cowards that brought their demise ought not either. Let's treat them like the scum they are.

My memories of 9/11 linger on and the lingering impressions I retain are tinted black, white and red.

Jennifer Kelly, BLURT Contributing Editor, Walpole NH

Late August of 2001, I had gotten my only son off to first grade and was enjoying, for the first time in six years, uninterrupted days to get my work done, which, then as now, consisted mostly of writing marketing materials for financial services companies. I was really busy, too, in the good, doable kind of way. I remember meeting a friend for coffee (unheard of!) and saying, "Things are going so well. Something awful will probably happen," and we both laughed.

The next week, a Tuesday, my husband called me from the YMCA. "Turn on the TV," he said, and I did, just in time to see the second tower fall. That was Tuesday. I was supposed to be in the city on Thursday to meet a client downtown, an appointment that was, obviously cancelled. And in fact, almost everything was cancelled. I had written an article about something, in which four of five sources had offices in the Trade Towers. I spent the week trying to find out, tactfully, if any of them had died (none had). In another assignment, an article about an asset management company, pretty much everybody but one guy whose kid had a dentist appointment had gone down with the towers. We spent a couple of days talking about whether to take their names off the quotes in the brochures. I had previously lived in New York for eight years and had a bunch of friends still there, and couldn't get through on the phone to check on them. Finally, email confirmed that everyone was okay.

But mainly, the paying work stopped and I faced endless, beautiful sunny days with nothing to do but pick up my son at the bus stop at 3:30 p.m. Which drove me a little crazy. I wrote to George Zahora at Splendid magazine, an internet site that I checked once a week or so. I've been a writer forever, and I love music, I said. Could I write for you? And a couple of weeks later, a big box of CD-Rs and no-name releases came in the mail. It was, obviously, the stuff nobody else wanted, but it made me happy in a way that seemed out of proportion. Eventually, Wall Street came back and I was working again, but the paying work never took over my life to the same degree (and I never made as much money again).

I'd become a music writer somehow.

Logan K. Young, Vienna VA (9/11: in Georgetown, SC)
A high school senior already accepted at the only college I applied to (GO COCKS!), I had a bad case of "senior-itis" the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. And though both my mom and pop taught at Georgetown High, I ditched first period that day to get high with my drug buddy Chase under the bridge downtown. Ironically, I had installed a six-disc, state-of-the-art CD player in my shitty ‘86 Buick LeSabre; apropos, Chase and I were blazing to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik. (I know, I know... kids!)

Not wanting to be late for second period -- Chase had a chemistry test, I seem to remember -- we made it back to GHS with neither faction of the PTA the wiser. The TV was on in Coach Mahan's Government & Economics class, the class itself rapt. And stoned though I was, I quickly realized no one gave a fuck that I had skip ‘n' toked. The Twin Towers were on fire!

To this day, I've yet to have a more sobering experience. I reckon that holds true for every student in my graduating class, every last person of my epoch. Honestly, I didn't give up weed until long after college (GO WATER BONGS!). But I did finally quit once I settled in Northern Virginia -- about five miles west of the Pentagon off I-66. I had to. Every time I passed by that place, I couldn't help but feel ashamed, like a traitor even. Almost a half-century later, my old man can still recall exactly what he was doing the day JFK was shot. Where was I then, Mr. Jackson, when the world stopped turning that September day? I shudder to think what I'm to tell my own children when they ask. Just say, "No?"

Johnny Mnemonic, BLURT blogger, London (9/11: from Brooklyn, but in UK)

My story may be a bit more convoluted than some due to my geographical location at the time of 9/11: while I lived in Brooklyn and worked for a major American music magazine based in Manhattan, that week I happened to be in London for a few days on a writing assignment. In a sense, then, geography also colors my memories of that shocking day. Unlike most Americans who were probably just getting their morning coffee when the news broke, I was already well into my afternoon, with plans for an early trip to the pub with some of my new English friends. In fact, I was walking down the street past the doorway of a restaurant when I noticed a bunch of people inside crowding at the bar and staring slackjawed at the television on the wall.

Being that far away from home made for a surreal and helpless experience, particularly when I kept trying to call the magazine office and continually received the equivalent of a "busy" signal. After some time I was able to reach a friend, who explained that much of the phone service in the NYC area had been disrupted. Over the next few days I managed to hear from most of my other friends and close co-workers, none of whom had been injured. That was a huge relief. After that I had to contend with the disruption of air travel, and my return to the U.S. from England would be considerably delayed. I felt another huge surge of relief when I finally stepped off the plane onto American soil.

And yet... in the months and years that followed, relief gradually changed to indignation and outright fury. I watched the Bush administration embark upon its so-called "war on terror" - a euphemism for revenge and imperialism. I watched the erosion of our personal rights in the name of another euphemism: "national security." I watched the rise of blatant jingoism and the efforts to shout down those who dared to speak out against what was happening, artists like Steve Earle and Dixie Chicks. It's been ten years; you know the rest.

So when my employer abruptly closed up shop a couple of years ago (a casualty of the internet, we were told, although I think the money just ran out) and I had an opportunity to return to England for a temporary gig, I jumped. That gig led to another, and for the time being I'm still in London, in no hurry to get back home this time. I love America and will always be an American, but thanks to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their ilk (not to mention their British pawn, former Prime Minister Tony Blair), it's not the same America I grew up believing in. That makes the lingering pain of 9/11 all the deeper.

Jud Cost, Santa Clara CA

I got a frantic phone call from my daughter in 2001, telling me she'd heard on the radio that an airplane had flown, maybe accidentally, into the World Trade Center. By the time the second plane hit, my wife and I were glued to the TV screen.

During lulls in the news-gathering, my mind wandered back to how much this felt like three similar tragedies, two local and one national. I remembered standing in the kitchen with my mom on a Friday morning in 1963 while we heard constantly updated reports that ended with the bulletin that President John F. Kennedy had died from gunshot wounds suffered during a parade in Dallas. Due to emotional exhaustion, we didn't go to church that Sunday morning. I turned on the TV to get a first look at the suspected assassin as he was transported from one Dallas jail to another and was horrified to watch someone gun down Lee Harvey Oswald under police escort.

In November of 1978, I was parked outside a 7-11 convenience store with the radio on, waiting for a press conference by San Francisco mayor George Moscone after meeting that morning with supervisor Dan White to announce whether White, who'd recently resigned his post, would get his job back. Instead of Moscone, a badly shaken board of supervisors president Dianne Feinstein announced that Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk had been shot and killed and that the only suspect was supervisor Dan White.

Mere weeks later, as we were about to enter a Chinese restaurant in San Jose, the radio blurted out the first grim reports from Jonestown, Guyana, that California congressman Leo Ryan had been murdered by followers of Rev. Jim Jones and that many of Jones' extended family were also lying dead in his jungle compound. We recalled seeing Ryan, two years earlier, riding in the back of a convertible, waving to the crowd as the grand marshal of the Bicentennial Fourth of July parade in Redwood City, Calif.

Now here we were again, on September 11, witnessing something so appallingly sad it would never be erased from the memory banks. For some odd reason, I reflected that all four events had been first reported by all-news radio outlets, and that the next one would probably be experienced in a totally different manner. A world full of iPhones (and whatever comes next) has already assured that will certainly be the case.

Wayne Robins, Queens NY

By a simple twist of fate, Sept. 11, 2011, is also the tenth anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's ‘Love and Theft.' I'd been a contract writer for MSNBC.com from its inception through the end of the 1990s; I wrote about family life in the column "Raising Daddy," and wrote posthumous appreciations of celebrities such as Jimmy Stewart and Robert Mitchum, Lady Di, Sharie Lewis, and the Notorious B.I.G. I was also writing food columns for the Newark Star-Ledger and the New York Daily News.

I was, in fact, on a hiatus from music criticism since around 1995, which is why I missed the triumph of Tool and the golden era of Creed, Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock. But whomever MSNBC assigned to review the album hadn't been able to get a copy in time. I had not only listened to it, I had a theory why the title itself, ‘Love and Theft', appears in quotes. Two years earlier, I had read Eric Lott's history of minstrel shows and blackface, Love and Theft, as part of an independent study project I was doing under the tutelage of professor Todd Gitlin during my final semester of a fellowship/M.A. program in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at NYU's graduate school of journalism. I was convinced, and still am, that Dylan was doffing his hat to Lott's book.

The review went up live on the MSNBC.com site in the late minutes of Sept. 10. I fired off an email link to Greil Marcus, and looked forward to sending out more advertisements for myself when I got to the East Village office the next morning at Editor & Publisher magazine, the now-defunct weekly trade magazine of the newspaper industry, where I was an associate editor.

I live in a suburban area of Queens, N.Y., and took an express bus to work. I was probably on the 8:58 when traffic began to slow at the usual places as we merged on to the Long Island Expressway, heading for the Midtown Tunnel. Then traffic just stopped. Cell phones were not quite totally ubiquitous, but one of the dozen passengers on the bus, who had one, shouted, "Oh, no!" and said a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

A series of changing instructions crackled over the bus loudspeaker from the dispatcher. The first message was to avoid the Wall Street area. That was quickly followed by one instructing the driver to leave the highway and give passengers the option of getting off at a Manhattan-bound subway stop. When it was confirmed that a second plane had hit the second tower, the bus turned around and drove us back home. I phoned my office: people there, little more than a mile from Ground Zero, were safe. I worked from home, monitoring and comparing coverage of the tragedy on TV and on nascent newspaper websites. TV still had a big edge over the Internet.

In retrospect, I'm grateful it was so, for today, being exposed to the final Twitter messages of the dying would be too brutal to bear.

Stephen Judge, BLURT Publisher/CEO, Carrboro NC

I was working at Schoolkids Records in Raleigh on 9/11. I will never forget that morning because it was a Tuesday, so that's a new release day and we were expecting a desent crowd because the new Bob Dylan record was out (I still think of 9/11 when I see the cover of ‘Love and Theft'). Normally I would open on Tuesdays and go in early to get the new releases out on the shelves, but ironically that morning I had switched with my assistant manager because she wanted to go see a show that night, so I slept in.

When my alarm went off, it was Imus in the Morning and I just sat there trying to ignore it, half listening to the radio, thinking "OK, how many times can I hit snooze before I get up and get my coffee"... then I heard the seriousness in Charles' voice, Imus' right hand man, when he says, "Well, I - man we have some serious breaking news, apparently a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center!" and I remember going "What?" and thinking "OK, get up, lazy, go get some coffee and turn on the TV to see what's going on..." So as my coffee is brewing I turn on the TV to the Today show and see the fire in the first tower and thought "Wow, that's pretty bad," but thought it was a small plane and not a big deal. I think at times they were guessing about what happened and Katie Couric or Matt Lauer were saying, "Was this a commercial plane?" and me thinking "No way - how could that happen?"
As I sit there sipping my first cup of coffee, I will never forget hearing some woman reporter for Today, who I think was down on the street giving them a street level report saying what she saw or what witnesses saw. I remember seeing something moving out of the top corner of the screen, and half paying attention, I just thought it was a helicopter for the TV news. And then all of a sudden I hear the woman say, "Oh, another one just hit!" and hearing everyone gasp. I hear Matt Lauer say, "Yeah we saw a plane circling the building," and I was thinking "Yeah I saw that too!" When the woman said she thought was a DC9 or some large plane, I thought "Oh my god" and then "This was on purpose!" - and scrambled to find my phone and started to call people. I remember hearing the woman say, "I wonder if there are air traffic control problems?" and me saying out loud "Are you fucking nuts? That was an attack!" shocked that no one on the Today show was even saying that yet. It was obvious to me. We all saw it.

I know many people had this same experience but it still gives me chills to watch that video.

Eventually I went into the store. I remember people walking into the store that day almost like they had seen a ghost, 75% of them coming in to buy Dylan's records. When they walked up to the counter they all almost had a look of apology on their eyes like, "Sorry, I really should not be buying this or out today but here, ring me up..." No one really talked - the normal chipper self saying, "Hey man how's it going?" was gone. We just kinda nodded at each other. But I would say I probably had only about 15-20 people walk in the store all day, and by 6pm I called my boss and said, "Man, I haven't had someone walk in the store in over 4 hours. Let's close." and he agreed. I worked for Schoolkids for ten years and never - even when there was snow or bad weather - had sat there for 4 hours and not had one person walk in the store. It was eerie. So I closed up just in time for the president's speech and went home.
Just a month or two prior my wife (now ex-wife) and I had flown up to see my sister in Albany, and the flight took it right by Manhattan. It was a beautiful clear day and I was lucky enough to have a window seat on the left hand side so I had an amazing view of the island and the Towers and just thought "Wow, that's so beautiful." I also remember when Ryan Adams' record Gold came out - that was two weeks after 9/11 - and it had the album cover of him standing in front of an upside down American flag. First song "New York, New York" was obviously a big deal around NC because Ryan was a local hero. I had known him for years shopping at my store, and my wife and I had met at a Whiskeytown show in Raleigh in 1998. And then I saw the video of Ryan standing in front of the Towers just a few days before and just thought "You have to be kidding me?"
Obviously that song almost reminds me of it too.

It still gives me chills and tears in my eyes when I hear him say, "Well, I still love you, New York..." It says it all.

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